I really should get an annual pass to Stone Mountain. I’ve been out there often enough over the last year watching protests.
Stone Mountain, a Civil War monument that never hosted a battle, has become a front in the new battle of racial resentment. It’s a war without soldiers, only victims with varying degrees of legitimacy, vying to be heard.
I shot video at a Confederate flag rally last year of a Klansman wearing FUBU sneakers at Stone Mountain. It went viral. I wondered if I might stumble into the fellow again when the Klan announced they would stage their own rally last April. Antiracism activists came out in force to oppose them – Black Lives Matter, local anarchists and even a Confederate heritage group opposed to Klan appropriation of Confederate symbolism.
But not the political powers-that-be in DeKalb County.
Sure, there’s something to be said about empowering racists by paying attention to them. Why lend them legitimacy with formal condemnation? But I think the circumstances our society faces, nationally and locally, demand something more of us today.
We’ve grown used to whispered appeals to racial solidarity in our politics. It wins elections. It also drives the electorate into their respective spider holes, guns drawn, making real dialogue and real solutions impossible.
Alas, DeKalb distinguishes itself in the war of old grudges. Politicians here – black and white – rely to some degree on race as insulation against bad policy or bad judgment. Inquiry about improper spending on the county commission is dismissed as a witch hunt by the media looking for bad behavior in black leaders. An expansion of early voting is attacked by a white legislator as primarily benefiting black voters. Reasonable arguments about how county resources should be allocated devolve into racial grievances about the quality of the roads in white neighborhoods or the quantity of police officers in black neighborhoods.
We’ve stopped looking at the big picture. The whispers of racial solidarity are turning into shouts.
The events of Ferguson and Baltimore show a black society unwilling to passively accept racial inequality from its government. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is capitalizing on unaddressed white working-class racial resentment. For each group, their resentment is the only reality that matters. We’re in a dangerous time.
Places with a mechanism for reconciliation will survive the coming storm. We have to build that mechanism here. It’s entirely possible.
Consider the tranche of criminal justice system reforms Gov. Nathan Deal signed this year. More alternative sentences for drug crimes. More nonviolent offenders will stay out of prison. Police will no longer testify in grand juries without cross examination. Missing a probation payment will no longer subject people to summary arrest. Body cameras will be less expensive to implement.
This is exactly the sort of legislation that one might expect to open doors in black neighborhoods for the Republican Party … assuming it’s willing to knock on them.
It’s worth noting that, in a Republican-controlled legislature, these reforms – Black Lives Matter staples – had overwhelming bipartisan support. When people actually, you know, talk to one another, it becomes clear that the changes simply make sense. They conform to the essential values held both by black progressive Democrats looking for racial equity, like myself, and conservatives with libertarian sympathies like Deal.
We have to look for more opportunities like this, to show the world that Georgia will not retreat into racially stratified, politically identified enclaves. We can’t fight racism passively, because those who profit from it will impose it on us aggressively. We have to look at the screaming forces trying to tear us apart, say “No” plainly and then have a quiet conversation — together.
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